This week’s exclusive Diary includes M&B all at sea; Formula 1 speeding into the restaurant sector; JDW’s spending on acquisitions and YO! Sushi’s growing popularity in the US.
Worth a gander?
London bar company Drake & Morgan moves into profit in a rather large way in its most up-to-date accounts, turning in a handy £960,000 pre-tax. The company has Langton Capital boss and industry commentator Mark Brumby on the board. Companies House documents indicate he was paid £38,333 for his services. And Diary hears that it won’t be long before Drake & Morgan hits the market. Next year, anyone?
Time at the bar
Last Thursday saw the Great British Pub Awards. Hottest topic was a rumour - one source claimed he’d heard from a dozen people - that the well-known boss of a well-known tenanted pub company may be moving on shortly as its performance remains less than stellar. And the word is that a restructuring expert will be drafted in. There may not be too long to wait to see whether this one’s true.
Costly exercise
Latest JD Wetherspoon results shows pubs are arriving in the hopper from a wide variety of sources. They are costing a fair bit more, on average, than when a host of windfall administration pubs where dropping into the JDW pouch. There’s the Trent Bridge in Nottingham (arriving from the Mitchells & Butlers estate and re-opened after a £1.646,000 spend), The Cooper Rose, Sunderland (arriving from a private vendor and re-opened after a £1,215,000 spend), The White Lady, Edinburgh (arriving from Cougar Leisure and re-opened after a £1,384,000 spend) and The John Francis Bassett, Camborne (arriving from administration and re-opened after a £1,306,000 spend). Average development cost has been £1,207,000, a chunky £350,000 more than the 2010 cost of £857,000.
Let’s not go overboard
Mitchells & Butlers currently has just five directors, two of them representatives of Joe Lewis’s Piedmont. Be natural enough to chew the fat with the boss on his yacht once in a while. Any of the current executive directors or chairman spent time with Joe Lewis on his yacht? In sunnier climes obviously? From M&B comes the following response: "The board meets with shareholders generally, as and when required to do so. Yes, they have met with Joe Lewis (on his boat) to hear the initial proposal of any offer." We are not sure it answers the question in full but it's definitely an answer.
Pit strop
British Formula 1 driver Jenson Button is used to high-speed tussles with the likes of Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, but now we can add Leon co-founder Henry Dimbleby to the list. Victus, the Button-backed restaurant, recently opened in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, and with it came a new website, that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Leon’s, a point quickly picked up by Dimbleby and his Twitter followers. Diary now awaits the Top Gear-style drive off between the pair!
Short stint
Greene King tends to like a bit of continuity at the top of the businesses it acquires. In the case of Loch Fyne, Cloverleaf and Realpubs the founders have been contracted to stick around for a couple of years. Capital Pub Company looks like an exception, as chief executive Clive Watson will be doing, Diary hears, a six-month handover stint.
Russian ramp up
Now here’s a restaurant market that really is in eye-watering growth. Yum Brands’ restaurant chain KFC plans to nearly double the number of its Russian restaurants by 2015. “We have ambitious goals -- to expand the restaurant chain to 300 outlets by 2015 which will require opening 30-40 restaurants per year,” Oleg Pisklov, head of Yum! Restaurants International Russia, told a press conference. Yum, which also owns the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands, currently has 164 KFC restaurants in Russia, of which 50 are corporate and 114 franchised. KFC Russian sales have been growing by more than 20 percent annually, ahead of a broader restaurant market which Euromonitor estimates is adding 15 percent each year. Tasty.
Sushi success
With the search for the franchise partner in the US concluded, it is good to know that YO! Sushi, the Japanese conveyor-belt chain, is already gaining some social media traction in the country. Out of a ranking of 312 major foodservice companies in the US based on the brands’ numbers of “active” Facebook fans — users who interact with restaurants by posting on the brands’ Facebook wall or commenting on text, YO! Sushi received the highest percentage, beating Denny’s, Arby’s and Burger King to top spot.
Czech mate
The Czech Republic’s biggest brewery, Plzensky Prazdroj, part of SAB, the brewers of Pilsner Urquell, has announced that they will no longer sell yeast to the Czech republic’s flourishing microbrewery sector. One brewery is not irked by the growth of the micros however. Budweiser Budvar has been a regular supplier of yeast to 10 other breweries in the republic for some time and has added one more this week, the first refugee from the PU ban. Budvar has also promised that there will be no change in their current yeast supply policy for the foreseeable future. According to Budvar UK’s chief executive Tony Jennings, although the micros are adding an exciting new dimension to Czech beer they only account for 1% of the domestic market at the moment. “You can hardly call that threatening competition,” he says.
